A Model of Spanish-Portuguese Urban Growth: the Atlantic Axis
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Dela 21 • 2004 • 281-294 A MODEL OF SPANISH-PORTUGUESE URBAN GROWTH: THE ATLANTIC AXIS Rubén C. Lois-González Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, (Spain) e-mail: [email protected] Abstract The Portuguese and the Spanish urban systems have developed with their backs to each other as the result of the different historical development of the two nation-states of the Iberian Peninsula. Since 1986, the date of Spain and Portugal’s integration into the European Com- munity, both countries have witnessed the blurring of their common border and the subse- quent appearance and consolidation of several Spanish-Portuguese axes of urban develop- ment. The most important of them all: the Atlantic Axis (A Coruña-Vigo-Porto) will be the subject matter of this paper. Key words: Urban axis, urban agglomeration, Iberian Peninsula, transnational, coastalization The process of European integration has been tinged with a series of positive connotations in both Spain and Portugal (the two nation-states of the Iberian Peninsula): the improve- ment in the levels of social welfare, economic growth and the strengthening of the contacts with the neighbouring country as a consequence of the gradual blurring of the frontiers. As far as this last issue is concerned, it should also be noted that two political unities which had built a strong identity and a highly individualized urban system of their own have ma- naged to recover since 1986 (the date of their integration in the European Community) the understanding and the relations with the neighbouring country. In economic and human terms this has resulted in an increase in the number of exchanges and contacts of all sorts as well as in the search for complementary elements between cities and urban areas on both sides of the border. THE HISTORIC CONSTRUCTION OF THE SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE URBAN SYSTEMS. On several occasions, historians, geographers as well as experts on Politology on the Ibe- rian Peninsula have made manifold references to the fact that Spain and Portugal were 281 Rubén C. Lois-González / Dela 21 • 2004 • 281-294 growing apart. However, this could be regarded as a very recent phenomenon dating back, to be exact, to the 19th century when the frontiers as well as a basic cartography of them were definitely established or even to the 20th century, when the dictatorships of both Franco and Salazar militarised the demarcation of both national territories and encouraged the mistrust of the “neighbour” (López Trigal, Lois & Guichard, 1997; López Trigal & Guichard, 2000; Guichard, López Trigal & Marrou, 2000). Spain and Portugal have adopted clearly different dynamics in a very important aspect, namely, in the construction of two urban systems which have literally turned their backs on each other. This, however, is logical taking into account that the industrialization and urbanization processes taking place in both territories coincided precisely with the period in which the frontier was most impenetrable. In fact there has been a wide consensus in the bibliography on the characteri- zation of the Spanish and Portuguese urban systems. The basis for the organization of the Spanish space was the hegemony of the cities as both the general works and the territorial diagnoses which the Public Administrations elaborated prior to the planning itself (like in the Master Plan for Infrastructures (PDI) or in the roads programme) have made clear (Méndez & Molinero, 1993; MOPT, 1993). As far as Portugal is concerned, our description of the urban system will be based on the contributions of three influential geographers, J. Gaspar, J. Ferrao (and his typology of the different ways on which the Lusitanian territory has organised) and C.A. Medeiros (an expert on the publication of geographies of Portugal) (Gaspar, 1985; Medeiros, 1987; Ferrao, 2002). Throughout the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century, the economic growth in Spain pivoted around certain coastal regions, which from the start comprised se- veral cities and urban agglomerations of certain importance. Examples can be found in Ca- talonia, the Basque Country, Valencia, the axis Seville-Cádiz, Vigo, A Coruña, Gijón- Oviedo, etc. In the Spanish interior, however, only Madrid stood out in the middle of a series of rural regions with a low population density. Although the Spanish urban system has proved to be much more complex in the last decades, it can still be said that the whole coast could be defined as a group of more or less continuous highly urbanized axes (Car- reras & Nadal, 1990). The best examples can be found firstly on the Mediterranean coast, with a sequence of cities, metropolises and other urban spaces that go all the way from Malaga up to Barcelona and the French border; secondly, in the Basque Country with the continuity Bilbao-San Sebastián; thirdly in the Asturian triangle Gijón-Oviedo and Avilés, also in A Coruña-Santiago-Vigo and finally in Cádiz-Seville. In the interior, apart from Madrid, Zaragoza and the Ebro Valley have grown significantly and so have Valladolid- Burgos thereby forming a triangle of urbanization within a huge but not densely populated space with a weak urban network (Méndez, Molinero, 1993) (Fig 1). Significantly enough, one of the big urban centres or main axes that have emerged in 20th-century Spain have developed in the vicinity of Portugal. Only Vigo could be regarded as an example of quite a big city near the border (more than 250,000 inhabitants since the 1970s) and the same could be said of Badajoz or Huelva (around 100,000 inhabitants, in those dates), but these two were far more modest examples (López Trigal, Guichard, 2000). 282 A model of Spanish-Portuguese urban growth: the atlantic axis Figure 1: Spanish urban system. 283 Rubén C. Lois-González / Dela 21 • 2004 • 281-294 As it is logical, the models of urban growth in Portugal have been more simple than in Spain. From the 18th century onwards, two main cities, Lisbon in the south and Porto in the north, have been singled out amongst all the other urban centres. In fact some classic geog- raphers attempted to oppose a northern and a southern Portugal, when in fact they were actually speaking about two territorial systems which were centralized by autonomous urban networks. Thus, in the northern region we have Porto and its metropolitan area (with Gaia, Maia, Gondomar and so on) whose population has almost reached the million people for decades, then we have the neighbouring cities of Braga and Guimaraes (between 50,000 and 100,000 inhabitants), further north we have Viana do Castelo and further inland we have the more modest Chaves, Vila Real and Bragança (10,000-15,000 inhabitants). In the south we have Lisbon and its large metropolitan area (2.5 million inhabitants) with its quick connection with medium-sized towns such as Évora, Beja or Santarem. Right in the middle of the country only Aveiro and Coimbra (from 60,000 to 120,000 inhabitants) acted as links between these well-defined sub-systems (Barata Salgueiro, 1992; Ferrao, 2002). We have just referred to the opposition north-south in Portugal yet a lot more signify- cant is the contrast that exists between the coastal and inland areas. Both Lisbon and Porto are coastal cities and harbours and their metropolitan areas are organised according to their distance from the Atlantic. Braga, Guimaraes, Coimbra or Aveiro are also located along the coast and significantly enough there are no inland urban centres that reach the 50,000 in- habitants. Therefore it could be safely concluded that the Portuguese urban system shows signs of a process of coastalisation which has even increased in recent times (Barata Sal- gueiro, 1992; Ferrao, 2002) (Figure 2). The economy as well as the axes of urban growth in Portugal look towards the Atlantic and once more they have placed themselves turning their backs on Spain. All we have said so far has given ample proof that the Spanish and Portuguese urban systems were constructed in a completely different way. The decades of the 1960s and the 1970s, precisely the final stage of both Franco’s and Salazar’s dictatorships, a time when crossing the border implied overcoming many obstacles, were the period of the biggest eco- nomic development and demographic growth in the cities. Nevertheless, there are a couple of exceptions to this general rule of separated urban growth. In the south the location of the main towns in Algarve (Faro, Vila-Real de Santo António, etc.) and in the western end of Andalusia along the coast (Ayamonte, Huelva, etc.) contributed to movements of popula- tion and they also fostered and maintained the economic exchange between those commu- nities (Jurado, 2001). A similar phenomenon could be witnessed in Badajoz and Elvas, two towns which are no more than 20 km away from each other and which maintained fluid contacts despite the fact that the Spanish-Portuguese contacts in the inland areas of the Iberian Peninsula had been traditionally weak (Campesino, 2000; Alonso, Caetano, 2002). The area of Minho, between Galicia and Northern Portugal, or even better between Vigo and Porto, was, without any doubt, the area where the number of people and the vol- ume of goods crossing the border was bigger, even, against all expectations, during Fran- co’s and Salazar’s dictatorships. This phenomenon has a straightforward explanation. First of all, we are speaking of a wealthy and densely populated area. Secondly, the language which is spo-ken on both sides of the border (Galician, nowadays the co-official language 284 A model of Spanish-Portuguese urban growth: the atlantic axis of Galicia and Portuguese) is practically the same language. Finally, the fact that a big city like Vigo is only 25 km away from Portugal together with the existence of an important group of small chief urban centres on the Portuguese side of the border like Valença, Mon- çao, Caminha, Vila Nova da Cerveira, etc.